Wireless technologies and services have enabled users to connect to a network (e.g., Internet) without cables, with devices such as laptops, (Personal Digital Assistants) PDAs, and cellular phones. Today, mobile devices have multiple wireless communication interfaces (e.g., multi-homed). A wireless device can connect to the Internet on a wireless wide area network (WWAN) interface, such as a cellular link. Although this type of interface provides long-range service, the bandwidth is quite limited.
A multi-homed device can also connect to the Internet using a high-speed, short ranged wireless local area network (WLAN) interface such as IEEE 802.11. With this setting of bandwidth mismatch between WWAN and WLAN interfaces, multiple devices and/or multiple users connected to each other in a local area wireless network can “aggregate” their low speed WAN channels to form a high-speed logical WAN link. Such channel aggregation can enable services such as rich-media streaming which would be difficult on a single WAN channel. The aggregation is achieved by using an inverse multiplexing technique such as striping. Striping over wireless channels presents a challenge because of bursty losses and location dependent errors inherent to wireless channels.